12 Years a Slave (2013)

This film may be brutal, but unlike a deliberately tragic story designed to pull on your heartstrings, 12 Years a Slave is confronting its viewers with the realities of life as a slave. After all, this film is a biographical piece. We follow the life of Solomon Northup, a once free man tricked into a life of slavery. The film is an adaption of the 1853 autobiography of the same name.

Solomon must hide his past. He is forced into a new identity and given a new name. Any mention of his past education is meet with hostility. The white characters in this film wish to erase Solomon’s past to better oppress him in his present.

As the film’s title suggests, his time as a slave is finite, but that is bittersweet for the viewer as we encounter many other slaves who have no end in sight for their torture. And it is torture, 12 Years a Slave lays out the subjugation of black slaves in excruciating detail. This film earned the award for best picture at the Academy Awards, and it's deserving of that honour. This film forces the viewer to acknowledge history. Of course, I was aware of the horrors of slavery, but I now realise it was easy to ignore the true nature of the violence inflicted on black slaves.

Modern day racism is more insidious, but in the 1800s slave owners were open, even proud, of the structure of white supremacy. The slave owners refer to Solomon, and his fellow slaves, as their property. This relationship between white and black Americans leaves so much to explore that this film must only scratch the surface.

The worst of the horror is that others must carry on as African Americans are tortured or murdered in their presence. To act is to risk violence. The more sedate the slaves are, the safer they are and more likely to survive.

The topic of this film is ideal for a dramatic storytelling but I think it’s important to mention that the direction in this film is careful, meditative, and beautifully put together. Steve McQueen, this film’s director, has been an important voice of late on the representation of race, and by extension racism, in film. He is deserving of this authority as he not only makes compelling films on the subject of race, he is also clearly enamoured with the craft of film making.

As a viewer I was really taken in by the extreme close ups of craft making in 12 Years a Slave. We watch Solomon, or other characters in this film immersed in a task. The inclusion of these sequences felt very personal. This film is at its core an empathetic exercise for the viewer and these point of view sequences aided that cause. We are as much with the characters in their idle moments as we are when they endure violence. That pain and humiliation we feel on behalf of these characters is made all the more painful because we are so endeared to them through this film’s careful direction.

The cinematography of this film is truly skilled and beautiful to look at. I think careful is the best way to describe this film. I found the way the camera lingers on the atrocities inflicted on the slaves almost unbearable. But isn’t that appropriate? Our characters must always be on their guard and they must endure unbearable pain. The scenes of the slaves at work picking cotton in the fields as they are intermittently whipped seem arduously unbearable. At one point in the film, the slaves are forced to dance to music by their slave owner. This is truly cruel irony as they dance out of fear, devoid of any enjoyment for the task.

This film has a compelling narrative, its beautifully shot, but that’s not all. We have also been gifted with a wonderful cast of actors. There’s Lupita Nyong’o, who embodies the trauma required for this story. There’s also Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt as the only halfway decent white people in this story. Yet, both are still complicit in this system of oppression to varying degrees. There’s Sarah Paulson as the terrifying wife of Michel Fassbender’s erratic slave owner named Epps. Both characters are unfathomably cruel to their workers. I haven’t seen Chiwetel Ejiofor in his other films, but he was wonderful as Solomon. He brought a gentleness to the role that made the women's trust in him feel very believable.

It’s when I feel compelled to watch movies like this one that I feel optimistic about my challenge to watch the Guardian’s top 100 films of the century. I honestly think I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch this film otherwise. This is an important and moving film. It outlines the underlying tensions of a dark history of white supremacy.

I caught this film on Netflix. I won’t say enjoy it per se, but I will say prepare to have your eyes opened. Even if you think you have done the work to combat racist ideologies, 12 Years a Slave will prove that empathising with the history of slavery is an ongoing effort.